


Vitreous Humor

by willowbilly



Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Angst and Humor, F/M, Femdom, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Fuckbuddies, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Light Dom/sub, Minor Luke Cage/Claire Temple, Not Canon Compliant, Oral Sex, Past Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-27 22:03:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20767643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: “Fuck it. Fuck the drinks,” she says. “You wanna bang or what?”It's easy as dropping a match to a gasoline spill. It's... weirdly, comfortingly familiar. In maybe a bad way, butgodwas it ever satisfying.





	Vitreous Humor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [royal_chandler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/royal_chandler/gifts).

> Takes place after Daredevil s3 and ignores basically Everything Else. Also includes rather glib treatment of Jessica's irresponsible alcohol consumption

Jessica goes straight to Murdock's apartment almost as soon as she hears the news about Daredevil being back. As soon as she's double-checked that the news is actually about Matt, and once she's then triple-checked with people who actually know him.

She knocks on his door and then waits patiently for three entire seconds before she swears to herself below her breath and then breaks the doorknob with a twist of her wrist and the give of brass crumpling beneath the cheap, chunky polyester knit of her fingerless gloves. She barges inside.

Matt has halted guiltily halfway up the stairs, clearly caught in the act before he could successfully sneak away via the roof access. He's still in the athletic wear which he's gone back to using instead of the armored suit, bruised and bloodied all to shit.

Just got home and was about to do a one-eighty and march right back out to avoid her, by the looks of it.

“Get down here so we can talk like adults or I'm going to fling your couch at you like a kid throwing a tantrum with her baseball bat at a Little League match,” says Jessica. She wouldn't _really_ throw it, and of course Matt knows it, but he slinks back down to the floor nonetheless. He's wary as a feral cat of her ire and has that same smooth, feline grace.

“So _you're_ _alive,”_ she says, accusatory.

Matt tilts his head in concession. In a listening, calm sort of gesture which immediately makes her blood pressure spike with irritation. He grimaces because he can tell that about her, too, and then he forcefully smooths his battered expression back out until it's as blank as the black stretch of his mask.

There's a new, ragged edge of white cloth bordering the black, slashing across the middle of his face, and he has ropes knotted intricately and thickly all around his hands and wrists and up his forearms, the white of the ropes stark and bulky against his black compression shirt. The blood drying and flaking on his fists is bright red against the white; smudged yellow-edged chevrons of scarlet marching over his knuckles.

The ropework makes him clumsy when he places one thus-entangled hand over the back of the chair nearest to him. Or maybe the way he misses touching the headrest at first is due to the shakiness of an adrenaline comedown. Maybe exhaustion. Brain injury? Drugs?

She's jumping to worrying conclusions, here. Oughtta pump the brakes. Go on the offensive to take her mind off her own nerves.

“I had to hear it from Luke. Who heard it from Claire. Who had to hear it from _a lawyer.”_

“You mean Claire heard it from Foggy,” Matt says.

“It doesn't matter _which_ lawyer,” says Jessica. “Only that is _was_ a _lawyer,_ and that the specific lawyer in question wasn't _you,_ you... you sorry _shithead.”_

“I _am_ sorry. For what it's worth,” he offers, shrugging as if to pretend that neither he nor Jessica cares, and that he doesn't care that _she_ supposedly doesn't care.

Jessica sees through that shit as easily as it is to see through the right side of a one-way mirror. She pulls that shit all the fucking time, of course she recognizes it.

She's doing it right the fuck now. Trying to pretend not to care even after storming right over here and quite demonstrably _caring_ like _fuck_ about this stupid dramatic asshole whom she barely even knows.

“You're swaying dead on your feet,” Jessica says, gentling her tone into false flat indifference by way of compromise. “Sit down and I'll get us both a drink.”

“I'm not swaying,” says Matt, swaying, but he sits down. Without anything but his coffee table in between them he hunches forward, curling in on himself like a sullen kid. He props his elbows on his knees and clasps his roped-up hands together to prop up his chin; only his fingertips are able to properly interlock, sticking out as they are like so many small pink heads from a many-headed turtle's mutated shell; stubby little points of vulnerability which would be quickly tucked away.

None of the fingertips are too dark, the flesh unpurpled, so at least the ropes aren't cutting off the circulation too badly. For some reason, staring at his hands and the shape they're in and the way that he's bound them makes Jessica miss Matt's stupid gimp suit.

She immediately wonders if she's depraved for missing the thing, and is then certain that she's depraved for wondering if she's depraved. Then, because of this, she thinks of other innocent depravities which could be done with Matt; how pretty he'd look naked and tied up in his own ropes. How easily she could get him crying for it. She catches herself and subsequently spends perhaps a few too many seconds in silent self-recrimination before she yanks her concentration back to Matt.

He's perked up, head lifted, leaning just slightly to put his nose toward her.

And then Matt's nostrils twitch, and. He. He licks his lips.

Jessica's thoughts stutter to a dead halt, fixated and horrified at the fact that he _knows_ that she was thinking of him sexually and that _she_ knows _he_ knows and that there's no fucking _escape_ from that. Not until later, when she can drink until the memory has been dulled around the edges and it no longer stings her every time it rises back up to play itself fitfully over and over on a loop in her brain every time she's on the cusp of sleep. Not here and now, with this impending sense of _doom, _while she only gets hornier the longer she's horrified.

Because what if she's laughed at?

Jessica, well, she. She can't take that sort of shame. She can't withstand her own powers of self-destruction, her own overly justified yearning for intense self-flagellation at her every merest misstep, when she is ashamed.

She can stand being sexy; she can tolerate, and, so long as she can have it on her own terms, she can even welcome being an object of desire. She's lived through that in all its permutations and she knows it's survivable.

But she can't stand being... _accidentally_ gross, or _boorish,_ or _out of control._ She cannot stand being an object of disgust, and she despises it all the more when she disgusts others for _daring_ to be the agent of her own desire, rather than the object of someone else's.

And Jessica really _missed_ _Matt Murdock,_ under it all. She misses how familiar he became to her in so short a time, almost like Luke or Oscar all over again; she always falls stupidly quick and hard for broody guys with soulful eyes and an acerbic wit which can match hers, and somehow they all tend to wound her in self-defense. Justifiably so. An eye for an eye, and a wound for the wound which “Jessica's Love” itself _serves_ as.

So she has to own it. Here and now. Because maybe it'll all be over faster, that way. She'll get it out of her system and make sure that it's not a big deal so that they can be friends and so she can _keep_ Matt, despite him being a slippery, avoidant bastard. She'll be able to keep him as a friend, and she'll incidentally also have seen his O-face, and at least then she'll have steered herself off the cliff her own damn self and she'll know where to salvage the scraps from the wreckage; bad impulse decisions are kind of her forte, after all.

And she and Luke are actually sort of friends, now, finally. Oscar, too. So, going by that, entering into a torrid affair with a male sort-of colleague will only result in a stronger friendship in the end, even if there is a crash and burn. Irrefutable logic right there.

“Fuck it. Fuck the drinks,” she says. “You wanna bang or what?”

It's easy as dropping a match to a gasoline spill. It's... weirdly, comfortingly familiar. In maybe a bad way, but god was it ever satisfying.

“Uh,” says Matt, so taken aback for a moment that his mouth drops slack; his mouth is a glossy scarlet, wet and pliant and shapely despite the bruising, and she lets herself look at it.

She still reins herself in, though, and looks away again shortly. She's not an animal. Not a _monster._ She's not... _him._

“It's fine if you don't,” Jessica goes on. At least Matt'll be able to actually tell that she means that. “Look, I'll leave right this second if you want and we never have to speak of it again. Or we can just have those drinks, instead, if you'd prefer. As... platonic friends, or whatever.”

“As opposed to, what... fuckbuddies?” he asks, beginning to smile. There's mischief and pleasant surprise, there, and he does not wince at the pull of his own pulped flesh as his lips tighten across his teeth, the masochist.

She immediately likes his mouth far more with this expression on it, and she finds herself staring at it again, trying to memorize the shape of his amusement.

That's one thing: remembering a mouth, and, to put it crudely, masturbating to it, imagining it against her.

It's another, far more pathetic thing to see a smiling mouth and to know that she'll be picturing it later as she stares up at her ceiling in the dark. And not _only_ picturing it sexually: she'll just hold his smile in her head along with whatever other scraps of goodness she can remember the world ever having given her, and she'll hold it close inside, _beholding_ it like a magpie studying and arranging its worthless shiny treasures in its nest, and she'll do that until the fact of its existence has reassured her to the point where she can finally to get to sleep. Childhood street signs only go so far.

Jessica's not that good at finding things to live for. She takes what she can get, whatever it is and however small it may be, so long as it will give her enough hope for her to bother getting out of bed the next morning.

“Sure,” she says. “As opposed to fuckbuddies.”

Matt's smile grows wider and he chuckles, shaking his head.

Jessica takes this as indication that Matt about to let her down ungently, so she pulls in a sharp, steadying breath through her nose and prepares to pack away all of her hurt feelings into a tiny little box and relegate it to the back of her mind where all her bigger past traumas already reside.

“And take... _that_ off,” she says, snapping her fingers twice and then throwing her hand out to point at the mask on the word _that._

Matt stops laughing the moment he hears the snap of her fingers, and he tilts his head, his smile shifting naturally into a childish sort of confused frown.

Jessica crosses her arms and tries not to fidget in suspense.

He does the head tilt thing in the other direction, and she has the distinct sensation that he's giving her a full-body scan inside and out. Then he runs the tip of his tongue across his lower lip, seductive but for how he pauses on the purpled cut which splits the bruise and worries it for the taste of blood, and, as a challenge, he says, “Unless you were joking, Jessica... come take it all off of me for yourself.”

“Oh,” says Jessica, for a moment dumbfounded. For some reason she's... she's actually very surprised at his agreement. Pleased, by all means, but... The paranoid part of her whisper-shrieks that this is still somehow a trick being played on her. She ignores that in favor of bluffing her way through. “Wow. Okay. You got a safeword?”

“Panopticon,” he says crisply, popping the plosives. “Will I need it?”

“I mean, _probably_ not this time around,” she says. Matt grins and spreads his legs out wide in casual come-hither provocation.

“And yours?” he asks her after a moment, when Jessica has made no move.

She experiences an outsize surge of gratitude and approval at the belated show of basic courtesy, but she's not even embarrassed at herself for it. Because Matt, beneath the stubble and despite the body language, goes red. Blushing in response to whatever it is he's reading off her; so attuned to her that he's glowing as if she's just praised him aloud.

He's so very, _deeply_ weird, and she actually likes him quite a damn lot for it.

“Tumbleweed,” Jessica says.

Then she's across to him, landing comparatively lightly on the balls of her feet, her boot soles hitting the concrete inside the V of Matt's splayed thighs without so much as cracking it.

He gasps, and she thinks it's more in excitement than surprise. As she was still in midair over the coffee table, bringing her legs forward to land and her head down so as not to bump it against the ceiling, she'd seen him tense in automatic combatant's reflex before he'd decided to stay put. He'd have been able to tell the very moment that _she'd_ tensed to jump, too, before her feet even left the floor. She'd never be able to fully surprise him, but he must want to pretend that she can.

His hands curve against her hips and she grabs him by the shoulders, playfully shoving him back. This makes him gasp again, and she lets him try to shove himself upright, letting him push her arms back, before effortlessly pinning him.

“Yeah?” she asks, checking in.

_“Please_ yeah,” Matt says.

When Jessica takes off the layers of cloth which mask him she is slow and tender about it the way she'd deny ever having daydreamed, sliding her hands beneath it to push it back, his hair springing up disheveled as she unwinds it, as she strokes his face. Cups his cheeks and reaches to fix a mussed eyebrow with her thumb. His eyes are closed, and they only open after she has rid him of the mask, when she has the one hand on his cheek and has moved the other to cradle and lift his jaw.

Matt keeps his eyes open when she kisses him, and she does, too, just because she wants to watch him as she kisses him, and for some reason she can't help but smile at this. The kiss breaks with the curling of her lips, and when he smiles back at her she kisses him again, a little smack of affection right on that poor bruise.

That's not specifically romantic, or anything, the affection which Jessica's feeling. It's lighthearted. It's... a normal healthy fuckbuddy thing. Not that Jessica's ever quite managed that before to know, but she's _pretty_ sure.

The next kiss comes with a light bite as Jessica worries his lower lip into the taste of iron. He groans, this pleased rumble in his chest like a cat's purr. His eyes close and he redoubles his efforts to suck her face off, but once she's nipped him into obedience he's a good kisser, sensually slow and responsive, and she likes the rasp of his stubble.

Because she can, Jessica decides to pull a bodice-ripper and tears Matt's compression shirt right off him, the fabric snapping to her hands as she pulls it from either side of his torso, splitting it apart at the seams.

Matt's thankfully not pissed at her for ruining his shirt. He is, judging by the way he flushes and his breath quickens, _very_ into it. His head lolls back when Jessica pinches his hard little nipples. She props her knee on the edge of the chair, wedging it in against his groin as she goes in for another luxuriant kiss, and when she takes a nipple into her mouth he honest-to-God gasps in ecstasy and tries to grind against her. The protective curve of the cup which restrains his arousal somewhat stymies him. Which, given that without the cup he'd be kneeing himself in the balls by way of her innocently stationary knee, is probably for the best.

“You really know how to flatter a gal,” she says, with far too much amusement for it to be the deadpan remark she was aiming at, and goes for that other nipple nipple of his.

“Let me lick your pussy,” he says. Matt's mouth forming the word _pussy_ is both hilarious and obscene, and it sends a shock down her spine.

For that she bites him, lightly, and then says, with teasing grin she can't wipe from her face, “Magic word?”

_“Please_ let me lick your pussy.”

He has the bratty temerity to look smug at how she rushes to stand back and kick off one of her boots so that she can shuck her jeans and underwear. She only steps one leg out of them, her sock trapped and left behind in her castoff boot, and she plants her bare foot right up there on the armrest and spreads herself wide.

That's all the invitation he needs to lean forward and make good on his request.

The angle's a little awkward but Matt crooks his neck and proceeds to eat her out with a passion. Jessica grabs onto the headrest to steady herself as he immediately sets a harsh, dirty rhythm with his hot wet tongue, and then with one hand she grabs his hair and yanks at it, directing his head and thrusting against him.

She's dripping, her cunt even wetter than his mouth is, and his tongue slips easily inside of her. He starts to hum in enthusiastic unmusical complement to the firm, delving strokes of his tongue, the pleasurable vibrations of his humming voice breaking into a needy whine when she drags her fingernails across his scalp and grinds against his face, her clit against the tip of his nose, his stubble irritating her tenderest places in the most addictive of ways and her pubes quite frankly probably giving him a friction burn.

His hands find her hips again as the shivery heat begins to flutter through her guts. She repositions him so that his tongue is back on her clit. Matt gets with the picture and starts working his tongue against her, zoning in on her upper left side just the way she likes with those freakishly acute senses of his and rubbing hard. Some of the slickness streaming down Jessica's thighs is from him, his overzealous salivation as he tastes her and swallows her and tries with loud, sloppy sounds to suck her into his mouth.

She grabs the headrest with both hands and circles her hips at a more rapid speed; he curls his arm around her upraised thigh, holding on. Her hip is starting to ache from the position even when she drops her foot from the armrest to the armchair seat, but she's almost there. She can feel it building.

Jessica has squeezed her eyes shut at some point, focusing on the feel of it, on her own cresting pleasure, and when she opens them and looks down at him, at _Matt's_ stupid handsome face nuzzled against her cunt, the gleam of her own drenched pinkness meeting his shameless tongue, she's surprised into coming so violently that she _maybe_ screams.

But like. Platonically.

~~~

Every other day Jessica meets up with Matt. First it really is just to fuck; she really believes that she can keep her feelings under control.

It helps that the sex is very good. Distractingly good, and Jessica's never really been an intellectual thinker to begin with even when she isn't horny. They're both competitive, and in the bedroom this usually translates into the two of them more or less each fighting to please the other.

Naturally he doesn't stand a chance.

Matt... is comparatively fragile. Physically. Everybody generally is, compared to Jessica. She won't say that to him, but when she has him squirming and panting beneath her, when she's bracketed him between her thighs, she's hyper-aware of just how easy it'd be to break him. It's exhilarating, and made more so because sometimes, if it _had_ been a real fight, she doesn't think he'd lose.

Certainly not so easily, and not every time.

He'd be able to pull some jiu-jitsu shit, flip her off him, keep his distance and take her down via strikes to her pressure points or something. But instead he tends to fold. He gives himself over to her, and he trusts her not to hurt him the way that she can't trust herself.

They fought well together. When they had teamed up, and worked side-by-side. Jessica tells herself that this is merely more friendly cooperation in the same vein. The same addictive, heartless vein. It feels to her as though she understands him, as though the mental and emotional fragilities they share challenge each other into growing tougher. In some ways they're so compatible it might as well be Narcissus drowning in his glassy pond.

So they fuck a lot. She rides his face and then makes out with him and lets him fuck her hard with her legs crossed at the small of his back to pull him in, and he makes the most beautiful whimpers when she pegs him, and they _laugh_ together; having sex with him makes her happy. _Being around him_ makes her happy.

It doesn't mean anything.

~~~

“_Luke,”_ she calls, loud and obnoxious and with the half-empty bottle sloshing in one hand as she leans her forehead to his door and hammers at it with the other, “open _up._ It's... I need help.”

The cool, solid surface against which she's rested her head swings away and leaves her reeling off-balance. The safety chain catches the door and Luke peers down at her through the gap, his game face fading into quizzical disapproval as he takes her in. “Are you drunk?” he asks.

“I'm sleeping with Matt,” she says.

There's a brief pause. “And that has to do with me how?”

“I think he might like me back,” says Jessica, “but I'm not sure. So I'm asking your opinion.”

“Is that Jessica?” Claire asks from within the apartment.

_“How do I know if he likes me back,”_ Jessica demands.

Luke goes to shut the door, maybe to unhook the safety chain, and Jessica reacts by trying to keep it open. Her palm slams into the middle of the door, and when Luke catches it with his own strength the door gives way and cracks lengthwise right down the middle. It takes her a moment and a flurry of blinking to focus her swimming vision before she realizes she's broken it.

“Oops,” she says, almost genuinely apologetic.

Luke sighs and picks up the fallen half of the door where it's hanging from the chain, dejectedly trying to prop it back into place before giving up. “Come on in,” he says. More wryly, as Jessica kicks down the door's remains and shoulders past him with clumsy disregard, Luke says, “Make yourself at home.”

“Sure,” she drawls, in her best impression of Matt at one of his bratty moments.

Claire catches Jessica's shoulder and adroitly steers her into the living room, patting her upper back to move her along and saying things every now and then. Jessica only hears the curse Claire lets out, when Jessica, having _not heard_ what must've been Claire's warning about watching her step, bangs her shin on some shitty piece of furniture.

“I want you to know I really want to kick that through the wall,” Jessica confides to Claire, through gritted teeth, “but I'm not gonna, so. Don't worry.”

“And let's sit you down right over here,” says Claire, clearly ignoring her as she gently but implacably guides Jessica onto the couch.

Jessica shoos her away and scoots down so that she can recline.

“Boots off, Jones,” says Luke, and Jessica grumbles but she crunches herself over to rip off her boots and let them fall to the carpet.

“So,” says Claire, sitting down. “You came all the way to Harlem to talk to us about this. Worth it?”

“I don't know yet. You haven't given me any advice,” Jessica says. Now that she's actually planted on their couch she is starting to regret the trip, but she won't admit to that; these are two people she actually likes, and she's been trying to more openly express her affection. Which, even with as far as she likes to think she's progressed, still usually takes the form of Jessica refraining from antagonism rather than indulging in outright niceness.

She doesn't want them to think she doesn't want them as friends, is the point. She really, really wants them to be friends, just as she really, really wants to spend the rest of her miserable life with Matt Murdock.

“I never apologized, did I?” Jessica asks Luke.

“For what?”

“You know for what,” says Jessica.

Luke nods and calmly crosses his arms with a little bit of a shrug. “I'd still like to hear you say it.” He's not angry. He should be, but he's not.

She wonders how long he's been waiting for her to bring this up.

“I should've told you I killed her,” says Jessica. She leans back and closes her eyes against the horrific, uninvited swell of guilty tears. Reva floats in the blackness behind her eyelids, her face blank as Jessica's fist propels her into the abyss. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have ever. We shouldn't have ever fucked, without you knowing.”

“You going to apologize for the stalking, too, or...?” asks Claire. When Jessica opens her eyes again Claire and Luke are in the middle of a silent debate conducted entirely through glances and the raising of eyebrows, and then they're looking at her again.

“I fucked up,” she says.

Luke smiles, and Jessica's vision is still too blurry for her to tell what it means. “I don't hold it against you,” he says. She has to remember that she doesn't need to know everything he's thinking, everything he's feeling; he doesn't owe her shit and that's all right. Sometimes, maybe, friendship isn't about debt.

“I don't want to fuck up this time,” says Jessica. She gestures at Claire and Luke, between them, at the comfortable space which they share. How they fit together like they'd never been apart. Some not-insignificant part of Jessica wants to begrudge them their happily ever after, but she's also spent too long skulking around on fire escapes and gazing into strangers' windows to trust that it's real. To trust that it could be real for her. “You two haven't fucked up so far,” she says, lamely, because she doesn't know how or _what_ to ask.

“A glowing review,” says Claire.

“Please, I'm baring my fucking soul over here,” says Jessica.

“Have you considered that things aren't as bad as you think?”

Luke cuts in before Jessica can formulate a scathing enough response. “You know, _I_ think that you can stay the night in our guest bedroom, wake up sober and refreshed, and then have whatever conversation it is which you're trying to have here with Matt instead.”

“Or,” Jessica says, drunkenly serious, “you can tell him for me.”

“Tell him what, exactly?” Claire asks.

“He's so much more to me than just a fuckbuddy.”

“I'm going to go make up the bed with some fresh sheets for you,” says Luke, and Jessica downs her whiskey.

~~

The familiar hangover is pulsing in her temples by the time that Jessica drags herself to the Temple-Cage family breakfast table in the morning. The smell of food cooking makes her want to retch but she gamely accepts a cup of coffee and chugs half of it black.

“Sorry for busting in on you,” says Jessica, but Luke waves this away, and in the daylight the genuine regard in Luke's eyes is unmistakable.

“You'll be fine, Jones,” he says, with exactly the right amount of fond exasperation to put Jessica at ease. When he clasps her shoulder she finds herself smiling at him.

“Yeah,” Claire says, “especially since I called Matt for you last night and dropped some pretty subtle hints that you want to put a ring on it.” And she takes a bite of her toast.

Luke drops his hand, apparently as surprised as Jessica, though he's predictably less shaken by it; Jessica remains absolutely frozen for a few seconds and then must clear her throat to speak.

“You told him?” she croaks.

Claire takes another bite of toast. “Not in so many words, but. Yeah. You're welcome.”

“Et tu,” says Luke.

Jessica gently sets down her coffee. “If this goes south,” she says, and then can't think of any threat against Claire which she'd even consider making good on.

“He's waiting at your office right now with a bouquet,” says Claire. “But if he asks, you didn't hear it from me.”

“For fuck's sake,” Jessica says.

~~~

Matt is, in fact, awaiting her at Alias Investigations' dingy headquarters. He's in front of her desk when she enters, empty-handed but for his cane and not a rose in sight.

“You actually came,” he says. His eyebrows have leaped up in startled arcs above his red lenses, making his forehead all wrinkly before the furrowed frown takes over, and the stubble over his lower face is darker than usual, grown out thicker like another sleepless night.

Jessica shuts the door but stays on the other side of the room, squinting cautiously. “Why wouldn't I?” she asks, though she knows the answer is cowardice.

Matt shrugs, his hands twisting the strap of his cane. “Claire called me last night, and... I thought she'd have told you,” he says.

Jessica paces a little closer, sensing something amiss. They're talking past each other but she doesn't know why or in what way, and she's already antsy with nerves, her stomach fluttering unpleasantly. She forces herself to relax, if only so that Matt the living radar will relax as well. “Told me what?”

“That I love you,” he says, and he lifts his chin, his head twitching ever-so-slightly to the side as if in flinching expectation of a blow.

“What?” says Jessica.

Matt's brow furrows again and he cocks his head in the other direction. “You... Claire called me last night and got it out of me. She said to wait here for you, that you'd show up, and we could. Talk.”

She doesn't know what to say, besides: “Well Claire's a liar and an _asshole.”_

“Oh,” says Matt, increasingly crestfallen as his confusion crumbles into mistaken certainty.

He almost says something else, but clams up as Jessica strides forward, his shoulders hunching. She puts her hands on his, on top of the cane, and they're cold; she holds them in hers and chafes them, wills them warmer.

“I thought she told you I said the same thing,” says Jessica.

Matt breathes in sharply and then untangles his hands from the cane's strap, letting it fall in his haste to cup her face in his hands, and she catches his shoulders and tugs him to her.

“I didn't think it was possible,” he says. She laces her fingers around the back of his neck and feels him lean into her strength, feels him become a part of it, a part of what holds her up. His forehead rests against hers. “I didn't dare... hope—”

Jessica cuts Matt off with her mouth on his mouth, and when the kiss ends she takes his glasses off, gently, and bites her lip to keep her smile of joy from splitting her face open as she stares at him, her eyes eating at the precious sight of him as though starved, staring until he blushes and ducks his head to momentarily burrow his face in her scarf. He's so beautiful. Better than she would have ever thought she'd deserve, and apparently he was also stupid enough to have thought the same about her. They'd thought themselves out of each others' reach even while in each others' arms. The two of them should earn a fucking Olympic Pair Figure Skating-level medal for being _such colossal dumbasses._

At any other time Jessica would be enraged at the amount of time the two of them had missed out on. But right now, with Matt rubbing his stubble against her neck and not-so-subtly breathing in her scent like the total beloved weirdo he is, Jessica isn't anything other than purely happy.

“Want to inaugurate our official relationship with some desk sex?” Matt murmurs once he's raised his head again, once he's covered all his self-consciousness with some trademark mischievous charm. There's the slightest of scars slicing over his lower lip. Pale over that heartsick red; it's been a long while since his kisses have tasted of blood. It's a long while since either of them have patrolled dark streets alone. They work as smoothly together as always, whether fighting or bantering over greasy takeaway food on the rooftop.

She can't believe she hadn't recognized his love for her. He's worn that same sappy expression every time he's slept over, every time she's watched him blink awake to the warmth of the sunlight, when he'd roll himself across her bed until he'd found her.

Jessica glances beyond Matt's cute little grin to her desk; she's got a condom, a newly-dubbed and smoking hot significant other, and nowhere else on the planet where she'd rather be.

“Lock the door,” she says.


End file.
